Archives for March, 2010

Jerry Coyne relates that Birds are getting smaller. Most students use Wikipedia, avoid telling profs about it When I talk to writing classes, someone will usually ask if I use Wikipedia. I tell them, “It’s often my first stop — never my last.” Carl Zimmer has mashed up the data from his clever online survey…

Research paper on returning veterans. “There are about 1 million veterans of the two current wars in the Veterans Affairs system so far, said Jim McGuire, a health care administrator at the agency. He cited statistics suggesting that 27 percent of active-duty veterans returning to civilian life “were at risk for mental health problems” including…

BoingBoing loves The Open Laboratory: The Best in Science Writing on Blogs 2009, founded/published by the ever-present Bora Zivkovic and edited by scicurious. Nice pointer to four entires on weightlessness, major medical troubles, vampires v zombies, and how poverty affects brain development. Slate’s Sarah Wideman reports that Insurance companies deny fertility treatment coverage to unmarried…

I’ll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter feed. Darwin2009: Population-level traits that affect, and do not affect, invasion success http://ow.ly/1mMUp jayrosen_nyu: “The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company.” <— Bill Keller http://jr.ly/2pfz dhayton: “H-Madness”…

Neither plane crashes nor anti-aircraft fire could kill my namesake uncle, but MRSA did, and it wasn’t pretty. Accordingly I take a particular in this nasty bacteria, and am looking forward to reading Maryn McKenna’s new book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, which I just ordered from Amazon, and which comes out next week.…

The Science of Reading is the Harvard library’s nice new site about reading. Lots of great old texts and some history of reading science. BBC News – Man assaulted female police officer with penis. The court heard he had been drinking heavily and could not remember committing the offence at his home in Aberdeen

image Bill Waterson Ed Yong, responding to a run of recent rumination about the nature and role of science journalism, ponders the value of the “This is cool” science story: None of this is intended to suggest that “this-is-cool” stories are somehow superior to those explaining the interaction between science, policy and society, or what…

The Maldive Islands played a crucial role in Darwin’s long argument about coral reef genesis. It’s nice to see them now play a crucial role in shark conservation by making the entire archipelago — roughly the area of Maine, but warmer and wetter — a shark sanctuary. From Sharks receive Indian Ocean sanctuary in the…

We’ll start with the science, cruise through J school, and end with healthcare reform or bust. Genetic material Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics : Genetic Future Mr. McDonald spanks the frightened. The American Scientist, meanwhile, takes a shot at Putting Genes in Perspective Culture and the human genome From the…